This re-examination of the Civil War, however, is not entirely a matter of emotional understanding. As David Donald points out, it is also a matter for the mental processes—for “rethinking,” as he expresses it, for taking the enormous mass of data and looking it over carefully, for trying to determine (now that the jury has all of the important facts) just what the verdict ought to be. Mr. Donald contributes immeasurably to this task in his new book, Lincoln Reconsidered . In this collection of essays he remarks that “the future is not likely to see major discoveries of new facts or fresh sources in the Civil War period”; what it does need is a fresh examination of the basic issues involved, a conscientious attempt to evaluate what is already known in the light of the new perspective which is ours simply because we come on the scene nearly a century after the shooting stopped.
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From Lee and Lincoln to General Daniel E. Sickles is about as long a stride as one can take and still remain in the field of the Civil War. If Lee was nobility of spirit personified, Sickles was little better than an outright heel. A man of immense drive and energy, he was singularly lacking in principle. To him the whole immense conflict was little more than an opening by which a canny fellow on the make could pick up some good things for himself, and he went out picking with immense gusto and pertinacity. In himself, Sickles was quite unimportant, although he was (at least in retrospect) an interesting sort of buzzard. His significance lies in the fact that he was a type. He exemplified perfectly the grasping, conscienceless operators who swarmed in on Washington during the war and did all that men could do to keep the deep moral issues underlying the conflict from becoming evident. If certain southerners have felt that the whole northern war effort represented nothing more than a scramble for riches and power, Sickles is one of the reasons.
The reporters who covered the war for northern newspapers were an unusual lot. They came on the scene, really, before they were ready. The concept of the newspaperman as an unbiased chap who is simply trying to tell an accurate story of important events without regard for any other considerations had hardly begun to dawn on the journalistic profession in 1861; yet here, suddenly, was a tremendous convulsion which raised the public hunger for unadorned news to a height it had never reached before. The modern reporter overnight became a necessity. Since he did not then exist it was necessary to invent him, even though the inventors hardly realized what they were doing.
Abraham Lincoln represented the frontier in many ways, not the least of which was the fact that he was an incurable linkerer. Mechanical appliances fascinated him. The frontiersman had so many chunks of hard manual labor to perform that any mechanical shortcut was bound to strike his fancy: Lincoln had tried his own hand at inventing, and the man with an interesting gadget to display could always catch his interest. As a war President, Lincoln had a wide-open chance to indulge this interest. He was commander in chief of armies engaged in the first of the modern wars, and most of the authorities with whom he had to deal considered the old-style muzzle-loader (for infantry and for field artillery alike) wholly adequate. Perfectly practical breech-loading repeaters were being made, and the mechanical revolution was quite ready to extend the scope, intricacy, and general effectiveness of all the weapons the Army and Navy could ask for; but except for Lincoln himself, hardly anybody in Washington seemed to be interested.
A good part of the South was a wasteland by the summer of 1865. Where the armies had gone there was outright physical devastation; where they had not gone there was the desolation due to the collapse of an economy and a social system. Across this wasteland, a few months after Appomattox, went a Yankee reporter to take notes on what he saw and to try to render a report on what the war had left. The reporter may have been oddly chosen. He was John T. Trowbridge, an antislavery reporter, magazine writer and editor, who during the war had served neither in the army nor as a war correspondent but simply as a propagandist safe in New England. The ground he was to cover, the fighting that had furrowed it, and the people who lived upon it were all new to him. But he wrote, finally, a book which was substantially better than anyone had a right to expect. Edited by Gordon Carroll, this book has now been reissued under the title, The Desolate South: 1865–1866 , and it is well worth reading.
In the Elegant Eighties and Naughty Nineties, Town Halls flourished like mushrooms on American soil. To them flocked entertainment-hungry audiences who laughed and wept and cheered for political speakers and minstrel shows and pure-young-girls-betrayed and Mark Twain. Harlowe R. Hoyt has re-created in Town Hall Tonight the whole gaudy world of the grass roots theater, from P. T. Barnum’s lectures on temperance to ten-twent’-thirt’ melodrama. Using his grandfather’s Concert Hall in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, as a prototype of the American Town Hall, he restages a joyous collection of scenes from a time gone by. Town Hall Tonight , by Harlowe R. Hoyt. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 292 pp. $7.50.
Editor's Note: Bray Hammond wrote this essay for American Heritage in 1956 and developed it into Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1958.
“Relief, sir!” interrupted the President. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster. It is folly, sir, to talk to Andrew Jackson. The government will not bow to the monster. … Andrew Jackson yet lives to put his foot upon the head of the monster and crush him to the dust.”
The monster, “a hydra of corruption,” was known also as the Second Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress in 1816 as depository of the federal government, which was its principal stockholder and customer. The words were reported by a committee which called on President Jackson in the spring of 1834 to complain because he and Secretary of the Treasury Roger Taney had removed the federal deposits from the federal depository into what the Jacksonians called “selected banks” and others called “pet banks.” The President was disgusted with the committee.